iPhone 12 Pro Max It's a leap year.
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iPhone 12 Pro Max — Technical Specifications (Apple Support)

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The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a smartphone designed and marketed by Apple, announced on October 13, 2020, and released on November 13, 2020, as the largest and most capable of the four-model iPhone 12 generation. Its 6.7-inch Super Retina XDR display was the biggest ever fitted to an iPhone, and — breaking the two-year policy of camera parity between Pro sizes — it carried exclusive photographic hardware: a 47% larger main sensor with 1.7µ pixels, sensor-shift stabilization (moving the sensor itself rather than the lens, a first in any phone), and a longer 65 mm telephoto reaching 2.5× optical.

The size-exclusive camera made the Max, for the first time, not just the biggest but flatly the best iPhone — a distinction reviewers debated (was the low-light edge worth the 228-gram slab?) and buyers settled by making it the generation's premium volume leader. It served one year before the iPhone 13 Pro generation restored camera parity between sizes.

The Pro Max stretches the generation's flat stainless-and-frosted-glass Pro design to 160.8 × 78.1 × 7.4 mm — thinner but wider and taller than the iPhone 11 Pro Max, and at 228 g the heaviest iPhone yet. The flat sides that charmed on smaller models divided opinion at this scale, digging into palms during long one-handed holds. Silver, Graphite, Gold, and Pacific Blue; Ceramic Shield; IP68 at six meters; MagSafe at 15 W.

Beyond the camera exclusives the Max matched the iPhone 12 Pro — A14, 6 GB of RAM, LiDAR, the 5G stack — with its 3,687 mAh cell again the endurance leader of the generation, if slightly down on the 11 Pro Max's record thanks to 5G's appetite.

The Max's main sensor gathered 87% more light than the 11 Pro Max's — big pixels plus f/1.6 — and its sensor-shift stabilization, making five thousand micro-adjustments per second, held handheld Night mode exposures other phones needed tripods for. Low-light comparisons put it clearly ahead of the 12 Pro and every rival of its cycle; the 65 mm telephoto traded a stop of speed for reach. Camera reviewers called it the best low-light phone camera made to that point, and working photographers — Apple courted them with ProRAW launching in the same iOS 14.3 window — treated it as the first phone camera that credibly substituted for a compact.

Sensor-shift stabilization spread to the entire iPhone 13 lineup the following year — the Max's exclusive becoming the platform baseline in twelve months.

Shipped with iOS 14.1; ProRAW in 14.3; current release train since.

Released in the delayed second wave with the iPhone 12 mini — the generation's two extremes shipping together — the Pro Max led premium-tier sales through the holiday "supercycle" quarter, Apple's biggest iPhone quarter ever to that point. Reviews split on ergonomics and united on output: too big for many hands, and the best camera and battery in any phone. Discontinued September 14, 2021.

The 12 Pro Max re-established hardware hierarchy inside the Pro tier — the biggest phone carrying physically better optics — and every sensor it debuted became standard: sensor-shift OIS lineup-wide in one year, the big-sensor arms race industry-wide in two. It fixed the Max tier's identity as the no-compromise camera flagship, the role the current iPhone 17 Pro Max still occupies.